The Six-Day Bicycle Races

America's Jazz-Age Sport

Peter Joffre Nye, with Jeff Groman and Mark
Tyson

Format:

8ｽ x
11 in. hardcover

Description:

224 pages
with 350 duotone and color photographs

ISBN:

1-892495-49-X

Price:

US$39.95

A highly pictorial account
of an almost forgotten
sport. During the period
from 1890 until 1935,
six-day bicycle racing was
America's most popular
spectator sport. This book
succeeds in capturing the
drama and excitement of this
nearly forgotten sport.

This book is scheduled for
May 2006. Any orders placed
before then will be sent out
as soon as available

It's a
WinnerThe Six-Day Bicycle
Races was awarded top
honors in the USA Book News
Best Books 2006 contest in
the category Sports,
General. We're as proud of
the award as we are of the
book itself.

An almost forgotten sport
brought back to life

About the book

At a time when baseball's
greatest heroes were were not yet
earning great fortunes in their
chosen sport, when football was merely a
game for college students, the
greatest names in sports were
cyclists, making
a handsome living racing
on tightly banked oval indoor tracks.
Madison Square Garden and other
venues around the country annually
hosted events that pulled in crowds
for six days and nights to watch the
greatest show in town: the Six-Day
Races.

This highly pictorial book gives
the first thorough account of this
once robust sport. Using photographs
from his own and Jeff Groman's
collections, author Peter Nye
provides the story that ties it all
together.

About the author
and contributors

Peter Joffre Nye is a journalist
and editor working in Washington DC.
He was also an amateur
bicycle racer with a fascination for
the historical significance of the
sport. His earlier books include
Hearts of Lions: The History of
American Bicycle Racing.

Jeff Groman is a bike shop owner
and a collector of
bicycle-related materials. In
addition to his bike shop on
Bainbridge Island, near
Seattle, he also curates a
bicycle history museum.

Mark Tyson is a film maker with a
long interest in bicycle racing. His
documentary “The Six-Day Bicycle
Races,” which is based on the same
materials as used for this book, is
slated to be shown on public
television.

Table of Contents

Preface

1.
An American Sports Tradition

2.
Origins of the Sport

3.
Bobby Walthour, Sr.

4.
Two Rivals: John M. Chapman
& Tex Rickard

5.
Floyd MacFarland

6.
Points System, 1916

7.
The Roaring Twenties

8.
Reggie (Part I)

9.
Crashes, Trainers, & Drugs

10. Mechanics

11. Track Construction

12. According to…

13. Feeding Frenzy

14. Bobby Walthour II

15 Jimmy Walthour II

16. Cycling Czar

17 Willie and the Outlaws
(Part I)

18. The Twenties Ended “with
a Whimper”

19. Willie and the Outlaws
(Part II)

20. Harry Mendel

21. Gustav Killian & Heinz
Vopel

22. Reggie (Part II)

23. Fade to Dark

24. Post-War Recovery

25. Last Hurrah

26. Exported to…

Bibliography

Index

Press Review: Bicycling
Magazine

January 2009

On the dedication page of
The Six-Day Bicycles Races,
America's Jazz-Age Sport,
the authors of this homage to
velodrome bicycle racing in
the United States thank their
families for "giving them the
blue-sky to rescue the history
of this once robust sport."

The 225 pages that follow
are hardly a rescue mission;
more a labor of love by three
men who invested their time,
care and enduring passion to
bring a period when cycling
was king to life.

Peter Joffre Nye takes the
lead on Six-Day Bicycle Races,
backed by the contributions of
cycling historians Jeff Groman
and Mark Tyson. The result is
a meticulously researched and
elaborate coffee table book
featuring stories,
photographs, news clippings
and memorabilia from an era
when bike racing captivated
our collective conscious and
cyclists were the major league
sports heroes of the time.

Six-Day Bicycle Races
begins with high wheel
bicycles in the 1870's and
ends with Americans Marty
Nothstein and Ryan Oelkers
claiming victory at the Moscow
Six-Day in 2002. It was the
first US Madison team claimed
victory since Charlie Bergna
and Cecil Yates won Cleveland
in 1949; and one that was
built on the blood, sweat and
guts of the legends found on
the pages in between.

Six-day racing is one of
the most grueling, physically
demanding sports of all time.
This book captures its birth
and will be cherished by
anyone who loves riding or
racing bikes, sports history,
or has ever been mesmerized by
the fast-paced, adrenaline
rush of velodrome track
racing.

Liz Reap Carlson

From the contents

Author and Contributor Background

On a steaming July morning in
metropolitan New York City during the early 1960s, I
waited on the start line with other junior boys, ages
sixteen and under, when officials I then considered
ancient men suddenly became animated. The sun burned
through a cloudless sky, driving the temperature up and
our IQs down. Yet the old- timers—course marshals, road
guards, and others—became energized, even youthful
again. They shouted, “It’s Reggie! Reggie McNamara!
Greatest Six-Day rider ever!” Incredibly, on the melting
asphalt they transformed from shuffling geezers to
gazelles bounding in McNamara’s direction. I never saw
McNamara, who had retired before any of us juniors had
been born, and he had left by the time my race finished,
yet I recalled the commotion he caused.

When Jeff Groman grew up in the 1950–60s
in Boonton, New Jersey, he played in the basement of
childhood neighbor Ray Dawson III, whose grandfather had
raced in the 1890s. In the basement of the Dawson house
were a ticket booth, vintage high-wheelers, and other
memorabilia. “We’d spin the wheels in our hands, look at
the photos, wonder what those old days were like,” Jeff
recounts.

As a teenager, he hung around a local
bike shop run by Italians, the Marcello Brothers.
“Naturally, I grew up thinking I was Italian,” he says.
“When I was fourteen, my parents told me I was Jewish.”
Among the shop smells of grease and new tires on Schwinn
bicycles, he heard about Six-Day races around steeply
banked indoor board tracks in New York City’s Madison
Square Garden, Chicago, and others cities. He learned of
the outdoor racing season on ovals in Newark and Nutley.
He discovered riders named McNamara, Alf Goullet, Norman
Hill, and Sammy Gastman.

“One day an old guy in the shop insisted
I go with him to his house. He showed me a leather
glove. Held it like it was sacred. Said it had belonged
to Alfred LeTourner. After a Six-Day, LeTourner had
thrown his gloves into the audience. This guy caught
one, like a bride’s bouquet. I had no idea what the
glove meant to him or who LeTourner was.”

After graduating from the University of
New Hampshire, Jeff pedaled around Europe and wound up
back in New Jersey, wrenching in a bike shop. During
slack time, he leafed through old trade journals and
read columns by Walter Bardgett, who wrote about
LeTourner, McNamara, and their comrades. “I realized
that these old Six-Day guys were real. I heard some of
them talk when they came into the Marcello Brothers’
shop.”

Inspired, Jeff bought an
early-generation Sony High-8 digital sound recorder, and
made home videos of Goullet, Hill, and other surviving
veterans. “I wanted to do an oral history, because these
guys were wonderful. They told great stories.”

Meanwhile, film producer Mark Tyson in
Colorado Springs considered doing a documentary on
cycling. He discussed it with Andy Taos, an
international cycling commissar, who suggested that he
interview the dwindling band of Six-Day veterans. That
led him to Richard Schwinn, a fourth-generation frame
builder in Waterford, Wisconsin. Richard put him in
touch with Jeff, who had relocated to suburban Seattle
and was a collector of bicycling memorabilia and now the
owner of two bike shops.

Mark admits that he had a passing
knowledge of the Sixes, but no depth. “I knew that the
Sixes had a hay day and then disappeared. I didn’t get a
feel or a true sense until I went to Seattle and did
some interviews with Jeff and looked at his photos. Then
everybody I talked with has brought a new angle. The
experience was like falling down the rabbit hole in
Alice in Wonderland.”

Jeff, Mark, and I researched the era of
Six-Days. “My single overwhelming impression has been
that it was such a huge piece of popular culture of the
day that it’s hard to conceive how this could have been
lost,” Mark observes. “Six-Days amounted to a major
chunk of the entertainment in New York City, Chicago,
and about 15 other cities. When you have athletes who
were the biggest names in their day, considered on a par
with Babe Ruth in 1925, you have to ask—how could those
athletes disappear from the sporting history of the
country?”

For more than a half-century, Six-Days
thrived as an American sports tradition. Six-Day riders
were treated as heroes. Every season they set a new
round of world records—most of which outlived the men
who set them. Today their legacy remains the multi-day
road races such as the Tour de France, originally
modeled from the Six-Day format. Our celebrated road
racers today are pulled through history’s slipstream by
riders flashing around indoor board tracks of the Sixes.